[DG: Teaching & Learning] Fwd: Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?

[kamann at stanford.edu]

Sending this to the list. Ann, hope you don't mind, I included your note to me, I thought it was worthwhile.

Lynn and Ann, I would agree with both of you.

Lynn, I think you're right that instructional designers will include objectives in their planning, but not every instructor does this explicitly at the activity level, which is why it didn't come up in interviews with instructors. They were trained in biology, or literature, or what not, and don't often have access to IDs or know what they do—-the most they write is a course-level objective. We did see one course where objectives were more fine grained, but these didn't seem to be tied to the actual homework, only the tests. We interviewed some instructional technologists, but they were mostly involved in training instructors on how to use Sakai; we had a hard time finding designers who actually planned curriculum.

However, if objectives were already part of the interface for creating the assignment, they actually would think about it. When objectives are only part of a separate portfolio tool, it's less likely to be encountered and adopted as a best practice. And I think we would agree that we'd like to spread best practice. To paraphrase something Clay had said, ideally, people wouldn't even think of portfolios separately in the future and the work on your learning capabilities spreadsheet isn't siloing that out.

Ann, yes, I'd been thinking that the instructor personas of Bob, Chikako, and Jan would be most likely to use objectives because of their departmental situation. Bob is teaching Masters of Education students so this makes sense. Chikako's course has to train students to meet ACTFL standards. And Jan's nursing students are doing this practicum in the field to develop empathy, which might be a requirement the program is trying to ensure. So, you are right, those 3 persona above are probably enough perspectives.

However, I want to come back to the idea of an instructional designer persona. Amanda is more of a junior associate and mostly does data entry. A true ID persona didn't emerge, not so much for lack of interest as lack of potential interviewees who were really involved in designing curriculum. Bob, Chikako, and Jan could work with objectives on their own, but it might be interesting to see what someone who was expert in this might do. Do we have access to IDs who function less as trainers and more as curriculum planners?

John and Michael had separate comments on portfolios in the sense of a collection of student work that represents their best work, or examples of meeting requirements for particular domains. I'll respond separately.

Keli

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ann E Jensen" <aj14 at txstate.edu>
To: "Lynn E. Ward" <leward at iupui.edu>, "Keli Sato Amann" <kamann at stanford.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 18, 2010 11:24:19 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [DG: Teaching & Learning] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk?


Spring boarding off of Lynn’s comment below, I hate to see us develop a specific persona for looking at objectives. Developing objectives, whether they are high-level/ open-ended/ constructivist in nature, etc. or low-level factual recall, should be a part of any instructional endeavor. I would rather see all of the persona responding to what may be a personal commitment to or a department- or institution-level demand for outcomes-based teaching and learning. 

On 3/18/10 9:58 AM, "Ward, Lynn E." < leward at iupui.edu > wrote: 



Hi Keli, 

Just about any instructional designer will tell you that the first step to developing effective and appropriate learning activities is defining the learning objectives that the activities/assessment are intended to address. So, I don't see the emphasis on learning objectives/outcomes/competencies as at all specific to portfolio work. We can encourage sound pedagogical practices by presenting faculty with a framework for defining their course objectives along with the ability to link activities and assessments to specific objectives. Some faculty may choose not to use these capabilities, but I think providing them is a step in the right direction regardless of whether the course is engaged in any type of portfolio activities. 

My personal hope is that Sakai 3 will allow objectives/outcomes/competencies/goals to be defined and shared at multiple levels (institution, school, department, program, course, individual user) and that any piece of content (an assignment, a blog post, a matrix cell, etc.) can be linked to any objective/outcome/etc that the user has access to. So, for example, any faculty member (and potentially any student, if permitted) could link an assignment or an exam to an institutional outcome as well as to a course objective. Similarly, students might be asked to define a set of personal goals that s/he hopes to accomplish and to link evidence to those goals. So, much like the ability to grade/rate, assess content, I am hoping that this notion of being able to defining goal and link objects to them will permeate Sakai 3--sorta like Syracuse's Goal Management on steroids. :-) 

Lynn 

========================== 
Lynn Ward, Principal Systems Analyst, Academic and Faculty Services 
University Information Technology Services 
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis 
Information Technology and Communications Complex (IT 225D) 
535 West Michigan Street, Indianapolis, IN 46202 
Phone: 317-278-5713 E-mail: leward at iupui.edu 


-----Original Message----- 
From: pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [ mailto:pedagogy-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org ] On Behalf Of kamann at stanford.edu 
Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 3:01 PM 
To: pedagogy; sakai-ux 
Subject: [DG: Teaching & Learning] Learning Activities and Portfolios: time for a talk? 

Hello all, 
I came to a realization this morning after talking with Clay. For the Learning Activities project, I have been talking about breaking the functionality that had been siloed in T&Q, Assignments, and Gradebook and Schedule. However, despite this, I was still thinking of Portfolios as a separate thing from the learning activities work we were doing. It's probably not as separate as I had been thinking. 

Early on we talked to Janice Smith to get an overview of portfolios and Sakai. We talked to Virginia Tech about their work with portfolios and they later contributed some interviews. However, VT was the only school that explicitly used portfolios and the interviews they had at the time were only with students and TAs. Because none of the instructors we interviewed formally talked about writing out objectives and tying this to learning activities , none of the 8 instructor persona talk about things like writing objectives or attaching these to their activities, or evaluating student work based on such objectives. 

This morning I read a note I had from a talk with Amber, Teggin, and Sam at Virginia Tech. They said that in one sense Assignments and Portfolios are alike in that students upload files to both, but Assignments is all about the submission, while Portfolio is more about the process. 

Clay has reminded us that the needs that have been captured in Portfolios could, in the future, be met from different contexts, since tool boundaries will not be the same in 3.0. While it may be that the goals of a person interested in capturing evidence that a student has met certain objectives is different than one who just wants to give them an 87%, it's likely that they share some common needs that only fork off at a certain point. This is why embodying clusters of needs as persona has been useful for our project: it's a tool for helping us to see when Jane and Lisa have the same basic common needs, only Lisa needs a little more, or when Mark needs a completely different interface from Tammi. 

While there is a part of me that wants to narrow focus, I know that we'd likely miss a great opportunity if we did. If we design interface for describing a learning activity, there are likely hooks into learning objectives that we need to plan for. Would an interface for grading a student submission be the same as that used for one evaluating it as part of a student's portfolio, or would it be radically different? 

I think that there are three ways we can start to build this understanding. 

1) touch base with the folks who are thinking about OSP for 3.0 (Noah, Beth) 
2) review the learning capabilities work that the T&L community is doing 
3) find out about VT's latest interviews since January 

After this, we may either need to add a persona, or it's possible that some of the existing persona might think more about objectives. 

What do people think? 
Keli Amann 
User Experience Specialist 
Academic Computing Services, 
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____________________________ 
Ann Jensen, Instructional Designer 
Instructional Technologies Support 
Texas State University / San Marcos 
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